White Knights
by Nerumi H
Summary: The worst nightmares you have are the ones where you wake up freezing. - In which Hans slays two sisters and is finally, finally king.


**.title.: **White Knights

**.summary.: **The worst nightmares you have are the ones where you wake up freezing.

**.characters.: **Hans - Anna

**.warnings.: **Light blood/violence

**.a/n.: **I'm never going to get tired of Hans studies, I don't think. I just like him being really pathetic I guess,,, haha. This was my last fic of 2013, written at 3am of December 31st :o

**X**

The worst nightmares you have are the ones where you wake up freezing.

You spasm awake to find yourself desperately caught in sheets, sweat flicking off your eyelids as you try to blink away the last dregs of blackened fantasy. Your skin is clammy, and you press your mouth into the crook of your elbow to stop yourself from gasping.

Shadows recede through your mind, and you realize, your body is cold.

Not just a chill. It's deep; a pulsing, gangrenous tumor of ice seated in your chest.

You can't shake it so easily. You have tried before. Ordering more blankets, ordering a boiling drink from which you gulp the steam to the concerned gazes of your servants. It doesn't leave.

This torture is omnipresent, but you come to realize as the nights pass that the nightmares that summon it are not so - you can never quite remember. You had laid down calm, without worry, and warm, and somehow you let a curse trickle past your naive inhibitions like rats carrying plague, crouched among the harvest. And how it must have tortured you while you were paralyzed in rest, turning this heart that has all it has ever wanted into a steely block of unbeating, unbleeding ice.

(It isn't hard to guess what you dream of.)

Tonight, you wake as usual - it's so often, now, but you are growing a sense of anxious impatience beyond your fright - but while your frosted muscles unclench you do not call. Not this time.

You stumble out of bed, throw a robe on and a blanket without the energy to fold them so they don't mop the floor, and amongst a spastic shiver you think you must be crazy for doing this. You must be crazy. What a fitting denouement to your scheme - you're crazy, you're haunted, you're so, so cold.

You stagger through the halls like a man dying, yet you are bitter to note that you may just as equally look like he's hunting for his salvaged cure.

The moon is an enormous, scrutinizing sphere and you're crazy.

The library isn't locked; no one dares go close enough to it to do the locking. Your hand slips on the doorknob - if you bend your fingers they may very well snap - but after a second try you twist it open.

Push forwards. Step in.

Air swathes around you, dry and dusted with old snowflakes, god you're cold, your movements feel faint but the body around you will hold you rigid in torturous determination - an aged Adonis statue left to watch his prides break in heavy pieces to the floor.

You limp past the couch, tempted for a moment to drop within the blood-red corners of the furniture and curl up like an animal, but you keep going. Dread is undetectable under all this cold, or perhaps it merely can't fit within when you hold so much desperation instead.

...Beneath the opposite window, its crystallized glass white with wet mist of the moon...

Light spills over the wide frame, gracefully leaps from the scalloped edge to the frost of the floor. It breaks in the shadow of gently fluttering curtains, ivory glow a soft final caress along the blue marble of a princess's skin.

She died lying on her side, knees curled to her chest, cloak spilled messily down a shoulder like a swallowing wave. Her braids are rhythm-less metronomes hung by her face, her hands delicate slaughtered doves, surrendering from tiny fists balled around her torso.

You have never looked too long at her face.

You sink to the floor, drawing up your knees to hold in a core of warmth that isn't there anymore. Freezing like this, it makes you wonder if there ever truly was. Maybe it was all just an illusion from the rush of blood, a blooming, dripping sun, and an isolated imitation love that eventually replaced any possibility of the real thing.

Layers tighten around yourself. You can't tell if it's any colder in here than it is elsewhere in the palace, but it's certainly brighter, as if the only room touched by the moon. Your bedchambers are pitch black. Some nights you keep a series of candles lit, and some nights too you consider setting your flesh on fire to be rid of this accursed winter under your skin.

(Some nights you dream of when you killed the queen)

Resting your head down onto your knees, you make a last effort by pulling the blankets up around your head and tucking in tightly. You feel like a little boy immediately. Hiding from something. A collapsed blanket fort around you, left to play alone in the ruins and be the last knight but all you do is sit and stare at what once was -

And here you stare at Anna.

Her face is blocked by a hunched shoulder and draping fabrics so you can stare at a sloped nose and tilted brow but that is all.

You shiver and it aches.

(Some nights you dream of when you killed Elsa, of the severe elation as you drew your sword over her crippled body, a nearly erotic fire surging through your veins - warmth, while your face was bitten with wind and you should have felt empty you anticipated that you were ready to feel nothing but the guilt you knew you knew it would hurt

but instead you felt everything and were so unbelievably_ alive_

and there was nothing more to claim, then, but the incomparable sluice of your blade through her back and the way it locked like a broken key in her rib cage, and the way she drew back to you with a strangled gasp - nearly suicidal how she did that.

You dream of the arch in her back that pulled her deeper on the sword and you lowered yourself to have her closer and it wasn't close enough to watch her throat jump and hollow so you eased her back, gentle, touching her jaw until her head laid on your shoulder you dream of her face you dream of her searching trembling hands like they could rip out her heart and save it, the feeble, fearful ice growing and vanishing and piercing her own skin of her incomplete emotions you dream of watching her feel so potently and watching her break under it

you dream so _pleasantly_ under the feeling of her blood gushing over the hilt and painting a sleeve up your arm. Pooling in your lap. Your thoughts wandered as she gasped - she was scared, of course, and mad, and sad, but what if she was happy? What if she was relieved, or calm, and you thought, what if you pushed her, how would she gasp if you treated her the way you _wanted_ like a king to a queen on their wedding night and maybe you could have her scream in agony and how would that make YOU feel...

You could dream -

you were sick then, you were feral were disgusting vicious alive crazy crazy

crazy

crazy

crazy

Now you are just cold.

You tremble.

You have half a mind to just go back to bed, (but you don't want to leave her) but you don't want to risk falling asleep. As if you could, feeling the way you feel, but maybe shivering so much will exhaust you. The library is so silent, perfect for sleeping right here. You recall the couch, and no matter how close to death your body thinks it is, it still lets your eyelids droop.

You look at Anna for a long time instead. You want to see her smile, suddenly, that crooked, ebullient, goofy, girlish grin and the barrage of giggles that spilled with it.

A king is allowed to want stupid things, you tell yourself, to make way for all he is given, and carefully, slowly, lay yourself down beside her.

You draw your legs up like she does, pressing blankets into your stomach and tucking them under your heels while your hands stay locked at your chest. You can close your eyes right here

(from her blood you felt no warmth and in your nightmares she gives you her rotting heart and says please when I am gone treat it like you would treat Anna please let her live a life she deserves please please please please I trust you)

and dream, if you really want to. You dream of freezing so often when your heart is warm, maybe you will dream of heat when it is the opposite.

Of burning and melting away...

...

...her face is so quiet.

It is petrified, but it doesn't look that way. Her eyebrows are creased, yes, her mouth drawn in a lovely tiny bow, but it is so smooth, so perfunctory of a distress that it looks as if she gave up with the whole tirade. Like she let the storm crackle in the sky, slid from where she was holding herself on the window frame, and draped to the floor with a wish to forget.

Laid down. Laid down and maybe hoped to dream.

If your heart really is frozen like hers, this is where the pressure breaks it into two clean pieces, the seams smooth and sharp.

A frozen heart.

But you don't have a devil to do this to you. You smile stiffly; you cannot see it, but the expression slides across your teeth with sluggish pride that one can call deception. But you mean it. No one is left to hate you.

You ordered an illegal attack on the castle of your family, you slaughtered the cursed queen, and let the baby sister die the way she had lived.

You're too cold and too crazy to cry, but you do anyways; piteous dry sobs that drive your nails into your skin as everything in your body seizes and resists fighting it with you. You have no tears; you gave them up a long time ago.

You shed the futile blankets and approach her on the floor, where she lies eternally under the moonlight. She glows from the inside like a dying candle.

You touch her cheek. It feels so little like her - you want to have this statue crushed - you want it to be more like her again so you can't forget and you can't lose.

You don't want to be so alone anymore.

You weren't ready for the price you had to pay, but you were so prepared to make yourself pay it. She wasn't. She wasn't. All you are is cold, and she wasn't ready. You don't want to dream.

...

You imagine you can hear her heart, pulsing like a small bird's in that marble blue and alabaster storm she's lost in.

You aren't sorry yet, but maybe you will melt if one day you are.


End file.
